1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an order placement and acceptance management system and an order placement and acceptance management method, whereby an orderer orders parts or the like from an order acceptant and the order acceptant processes the order and more particularly, the present invention relates to a flexible order placement and acceptance management system and a flexible order placement and acceptance management method, whereby the order acceptant is capable of handling the order in accordance with one's convenience.
2. Description of the Related Art
An orderer, for example, an automobile manufacturer orders various parts from many order acceptants, for example, an auto-part manufacture. In this case, it is necessary for the automobile manufacturer as the orderer to send a order form of parts, on which a content of the order including a part number, a quantity, a delivery place and a delivery date or the like is described, to the automotive parts supplier as the order acceptant. It takes a labor hour to create the above mentioned part order form with respect to various parts, so that, for example, as disclosed in Japanese Patent Application Laid-open No. 62-144457, a method has been employed to send a order form (order slip) for parts to an automotive parts supplier by a network such as a facsimile network or the like.
Alternatively, a system is also employed such that a computer of the automobile manufacturer is connected to a computer of the automotive parts supplier as a trade connection by a wide area network. However, even according to such a system, the automobile manufacturer as the orderer sends the order data to the automotive parts supplier as the trade connection via the network and the automotive parts supplier as the trade connection accumulates this order data in their database, so that the automotive parts supplier as the trade connection has created a required document such as an order form, an identification tag and a statement of delivery or the like on the basis of this order data.
Conventionally, in this way, the order data is transmitted to the automotive parts supplier as the trade connection depending on a convenience of the automobile manufacturer as the orderer and the trade connection receives this data for each time. Therefore, it is inconvenient for the automotive parts supplier that they can pull together the orders only within a range of the data accumulated in one's own database even if they intend to pull together the orders for every attribution of the part such as a kind of the part and the delivery date or the like. Additionally, in the case of widening the range of the data, the database should be increased, so that this involves a disadvantage such that an equipment cost has been higher.
Thus, the conventional order placement and acceptance management system focuses on the orderer, so that, on the order acceptant's part, the conventional order placement and acceptance management system lacks flexibility and freedom and it is not user-friendly.